Road Zombies

I was driving somewhere, late at night. I had a car that felt old, but it wasn't a Volkswagen. It had a large hood and an orange interior. It was a cold night, and some cold air blew in around the windows, but the heater was keeping everything comfortably warm.

The road I drove on was very narrow and badly maintained. There were cracks and bumps and dips all over it. There were no shoulders, either, just two ditches full of stagnant, muddy water.

I hadn't seen a sign for quite a while and I was beginning to think I was lost. I turned on the dome light and looked at the map.

The map was confusing. It was hard to drive and read it at the same time. However, this car had a kind of autopilot setting. I held the wheel so the car went straight down the lane (it was a very straight road) and pulled up on a lever next to the gearshift. The lever I pulled felt much like an emergency brake. A little dashboard light went on and I took my hands off the wheel.

The car drove steadily forward. I still had to adjust the gas. There was cruise control as well, but I knew that you weren't supposed to use the autopilot and the cruise control at the same time. It just wasn't safe.

I kept looking at the map. The car finally passed a road sign, and I figured out where I was. About half an hour from my destination. I started folding the map up.

Some bunnies were hopping across the road ahead. I would just see them flicker in the headlights, then disappear. Now and then I would hit some. They would hit the windshield with a sticky thud and bounce off.

I wasn't doing anything with my hands, but I didn't feel like steering again. I just sat there and watched the car hit bunnies.

After a while, I saw human forms walking across the road ahead. A little while later, I was hitting some of them, too. I felt kind of bad. As they bounced off the car, I saw that they were zombies. They were badly decayed and missing body parts. That made me feel better. I turned off the autopilot and sped up.

Once I was going about eighty miles an hour, I started deliberately hitting zombies. Rather than bouncing off, they splattered. It was as though I were driving through a field of weather balloons filled with tomato paste. I turned the windshield wipers on.

After some time, there were no more zombies. I slowed down and stopped the windshield wipers.

I came into the town I was driving towards. The first stoplight was not a normal stoplight. It was an enormous witch's head. Her eyes were green and yellow, and the red light was in her mouth.

The head looked well made, perhaps out of fiberglass. It wasn't suspended from wires like traffic signals generally are. It was too heavy for that. Instead, it was on top of a big pole in the center of the intersection. The pole was between the lanes, so people could still drive through the intersection.

When the light turned green, the red mouth light turned off and the mouth closed. The green eye opened and turned on. I could hear it creak.

I really didn't like the witch head. It was scary late at night, especially after all those zombies.